Five Places Jack Didn't Want to Go
by nandamai
Summary: Public transport and brothels and healthcare and flat pack furniture, oh my.


**1.**

There were no cabs outside the hotel. "We could ask the doorman to call?" Jack said.

"What? No, Jack, it's three stations away," Ianto said. "We'll take the Tube."

Jack frowned. "Ianto, I don't ..."

"Don't what?"

Jack shrugged, looking sheepish.

"Don't have an Oyster card?" Ianto teased, hoping Jack couldn't hear the edge of annoyance in his voice, but knowing he probably could. "Don't want to mix with the populace? Don't understand decimal currency?" He frequently had doubts about that last one.

'What? I know how to use decimal currency!"

Ianto rolled his eyes. He was feeling peevish from the long drive and not looking forward to another pointless meeting with clueless bureaucrats who wanted to place blame for the Cardiff bombings. "Come on," he said, grabbing Jack's hand and pulling him along.

There'd been a lot of this, lately. Jack was unsure of himself and indecisive, and it was often easier on everyone if Ianto made the decisions: what to eat, whether to buy more bread, whether they had time to make love, which of them should take a phone call from the council or the PM, when to send Gwen home after a 26-hour day.

Ianto understood, of course he did. In any other career, Jack would have been able to take some leave, get his head back in the game and some of the nightmares out of his head, spend an hour shouting at a wall or crying on Ianto's shoulder. So Ianto eased the way for him as much as he could, and was usually rewarded with a small, grateful smile.

Today, Jack stopped walking before they reached the corner. "Ianto, we're taking a cab."

Ianto looked at him more closely. Jack didn't often put his foot down these days, trusting Ianto to do the best for him and for the universe. Jack putting his foot down meant one of two things, and usually both: Ianto had missed something, and Jack was terrified.

When it came to him, when he imagined taking Jack down that escalator and into those tunnels with the ever-present possibility of getting stuck, Ianto closed his eyes and said, "I'm an idiot."

"You're brilliant," Jack said, now with the grateful smile. "You just can't always read my mind. Usually, but not always."

It wasn't worth getting upset or feeling guilty about; there were plenty of other things that were. Ianto kissed Jack quickly and let him lead the way back to the hotel.

**2.**

"I know! We'll go to Peviviclax Nine! Didn't you say you'd always wanted to go to Peviviclax Nine, Jack?"

Jack seemed to swallow his own spit wrong, and coughed at length. Ianto patted him on the back and looked on, amused, thinking this was going to be good.

The Doctor, the bowtied version, waltzed over to the central console and started pulling levers and pressing buttons.

Finally Jack managed to say, "That was more than a century ago!"

"What's on Peviviclax Nine?" asked Amy, always curious.

Jack looked sideways at Ianto. "Prostitutes," he said, "everywhere you look, and I _really don't want to go there_."

"Not just any prostitutes, Jack!" the Doctor said. "All kinds and genders and species and colors and some specialize in talking and some in cooking and some in teaching and you should be more open-minded, Jack. I'm surprised at you."

"I don't object to their profession!" Jack spluttered. "I just don't want their services!"

The Doctor stopped and stared. "Why on earth not?"

Jack groaned.

Amy put her hands on her hips and said, "You really don't know anything about human relationships, do you?"

"Our bedroom has bunk beds," Rory told Ianto.

Ianto put an arm around Jack's shoulders and squeezed. When the Doctor winked and said, "Just checking," Ianto decided he liked the man even less than he'd thought.

**3.**

"What do they do to you in there?"

"I don't know. Must be something awful."

"I heard they use needles!"

The other six-year-olds shuddered. One squeaked. They'd heard nightmare stories about doctors and needles long, long ago and weren't sure whether to believe them. The teachers had told them not to be afraid, but grownups always said that.

"I'm sure it's just fine," the boy standing behind Jex said. "You really think our parents would let them hurt us?"

The boy sounded years older than the rest of them. When Jex turned around he saw pale skin and blue eyes and thought, _pretty_.

"It's your turn," the boy said.

"What?" But the nurse already had a hand on Jex's shoulder and was chiding him for not paying attention, on the first day of school.

"No, wait -" he said. And then the curtain was swept aside and there was a doctor, a woman, like all the doctors he'd ever known. She spoke nicely to him, listened to his heart, his lungs and his belly, and pressed something cold against his neck for at least five minutes, it seemed to him. He squirmed.

"A little low on Vitamin E," the doctor said with a smile, "but a very strong immune system. You're perfectly healthy and if you take these, you'll never be sick on Boeshane." She gave him three pills and a cup of water, and coaxed him to drink three times. Swallowing pills was hard. And then she was done.

"That's it?" he said.

She laughed. "That's it. You children this year are an imaginative bunch, I'll give you that."

He didn't know what that meant, but another nurse was already taking him out the back, where his teacher and his class were waiting.

The teacher smiled and said, "There, that wasn't so bad, was it?" The others trooped after him obediently, still whispering but no longer frightened.

Jex stayed where he was. When the blue-eyed boy came out, calm and mature and still so pretty, Jex grinned, held out his hand and said, "Hi. I'm Jex Franklinson."

**4.**

Jack wouldn't enter the morgue for months. It ticked Ianto off, just a bit, because he hadn't had that luxury after Lisa. But he'd loved Lisa for a year and spent four months trying to fix her; Jack had loved Gray all his life and spent more than a decade trying to find him, more than a century mourning him. It wasn't the same. Ianto knew that.

Some days, the worst days, the days he hated Torchwood and Jack and the rift and himself, it still ticked him off.

**5.**

Jack was cooing and making faces at the still nameless baby as soon as he got her out of the car seat. It was adorable - no matter what Jack and Alice said about her childhood, Ianto had known he'd be good at this - but it wasn't much help.

Ianto went to the boot to unfold and assemble the damn complicated pram. He'd said simple; Gwen and Tosh had bought top of the line and refused to be paid back, though they did demand a contribution from Owen. Owen had complied without complaint and then complained when the others were shocked.

"Who's our beautiful girl?" Jack was saying. "Are you our beautiful girl, sugarplum?" The baby gurgled with delight, just as enthralled as Ianto by the crazy man.

"Fifty-first century pheremones," Ianto muttered fondly. He pushed the marvel of modern engineering over to Jack and asked, "Do you want to strap her in or carry her?"

"You go ahead," Jack said with a big smile, bouncing her a bit in his arms. "I'll just stay here and stare at this little cupcake."

"Nope, sorry, not getting out of this."

"Come on, you don't need me. You're going to be so good for your daddies, aren't you, dumpling?"

Ianto wondered if he should be concerned that all the pet names today were food-related. "Oh, but I do," he said. "You'll complain forever if I buy something you don't like." Besides, he knew that as soon as Jack saw the displays, he'd be bouncing from one to the next and racking up a very large bill before Ianto could even blink, and Ianto would get to hold the baby the whole time.

"It all looks the same anyway. So boring, isn't it, baby bean?" Jack stuck his tongue out at her and they both giggled.

"I told you, it's just until we have time to find what we really want," which would be never, and it was a big, mostly empty house. Everything had been a surprise, from the two Gelasia dropping off a human baby who had fallen out of a rift on their planet; to finding that she wasn't related to any of Torchwood's missing persons, or to anyone else on earth they could identify; to deciding in a three-minute conversation that they both desperately wanted to keep her; to the one-day search for something bigger than the tiny flat they'd been too lazy to move out of. Paying in cash had made that part easier, at least.

"She can keep sleeping with us," Jack said. "You want to sleep with us, don't you, peanut?" That, Ianto had learned, was how it was done on Boeshane, until the child could make its own sandwiches, apparently.

"Of course she can, sometimes. You'll go mad from that sooner than I will."

Jack stuck his tongue out at Ianto.

"She needs a cot wherever she sleeps," Ianto said. "And she needs her own room and a changing table and we need a dining table big enough for three and -"

Jack was paying no attention. "Lambchop, muffin, gooseberry, jelly belly ..."

"There are meatballs," Ianto tried.

"Oh, well, if there are _meatballs_ ..." Jack kissed the baby on her forehead and Ianto on the cheek, and started walking towards the entrance. Ianto trailed behind with the pram and his shopping list and a dopey smile.


End file.
